For the defense, ex-Worcester man

The prosecution is not the only side of the James “Whitey” Bulger trial propelled by Central Massachusetts residents.

Mr. Bulger’s lead lawyer is J.W. Carney Jr., who lived in Worcester for two years.

The New Bedford native studied at Chandler Junior High School from 1963 to 1965. After school he delivered The Evening Gazette on Olean Street, where he lived — from Mower Street to the last house before the Holden reservoir.

Now 61, the defense lawyer remembers watching television with his parents when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald and how “it was upending their well-ordered world. My parents were stunned and my mother was crying.”

Mr. Carney returned to Worcester to study at the College of the Holy Cross, entering with the class of 1974 and living at Healy Dormitory for a semester with future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the upheaval of the Vietnam War years he took a year’s leave and joined the Teamsters— a union membership he still holds (“If this legal job doesn’t work out I can always go back to the union.”)—and loaded trucks on Route 20.

Mr. Carney returned to Holy Cross, this time living in a sixth-floor walk-up tenement on lower Pleasant Street, and graduated with the class of 1975. “The two periods I lived in Central Massachusetts were very important to my development. I look back on these two periods with great fondness.”

Asked if he had been older would he have agreed to defend Mr. Ruby — or Mr. Oswald — the Boston College Law School graduate said, “I’ve spent 35 years in the criminal justice system and I’ve never turned down representing someone when the court has asked me to represent him or her.”

Mr. Carney said he never asked to represent Mr. Bulger but is doing so by appointment of the federal court. His previous clients include abortion clinic killer John Salvi and Tarek Mehanna, who was convicted on terrorism-related charges, both court appointments; and Kenneth Seguin, who killed his wife and two children, whom he represented privately.

While it would be hard to find two more different people than Mr. Mehanna and Mr. Bulger, there is a common theme in those cases. Mr. Mehanna said he refused to inform on fellow Muslims, and that’s why he was prosecuted.

In Mr. Bulger’s trial, Mr. Carney concedes that the South Boston mobster was a drug dealer, loan shark and a bookmaker, but fights the prosecution’s contention that he was an informant.

One of the first times the former Most Wanted fugitive could be heard to speak in court was to say during arguments among the lawyers, “Because I wasn’t a (expletive) informant.”

In a trial expected to last at least three months that is forcing lawyers to work nights and weekends, Mr. Carney looks forward to listening to his music collection that is in the neighborhood of 10,000 albums.

He recalls that the record that started the collection was “Meet the Beatles,” purchased for less than $2 in a music store on Pleasant Street in Tatnuck Square.